Fredrick Jameson
Thus, abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in
philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the
great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalized and
canonized in the works of Wallace Stevens): all these are now seen as the
final, extraordinary flowering of a high modernist impulse which is spent and
exhausted with them. The enumeration of what follows then at once becomes
empirical, chaotic, and heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also
photorealism, and beyond it, the ‘new expressionism’; the moment, in music, of
John Cage, but also the synthesis of classical and ‘popular’ styles found in
composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave rock (the
Beatles and the Stones now standing as the high-modernist moment of that more
recent and rapidly evolving tradition); in film, Godard, post-Godard and
experimental cinema and video, but also a whole new type of commercial film
(about which more below);
Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed, on the one hand, and the French nouveau roman and its succession on the other, along with alarming new kinds of literary criticism, based on some new aesthetic of textuality or écriture . . . The list might be extended indefinitely; but does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style- and fashion-changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation?footnote＊. It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism—as it will be outlined in the following pages—initially began to emerge.
More decisively than in the other arts or media,
postmodernist positions in architecture have been inseparable from an
implacable critique of architectural high modernism and of the so-called
International Style (Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies), where formal
criticism and analysis (of the high-modernist transformation of the building
into a virtual sculpture, or monumental ‘duck’, as Robert Venturi puts it) are
at one with reconsiderations on the level of urbanism and of the aesthetic
institution. High modernism is thus credited with the destruction of the fabric
of the traditional city and of its older neighbourhood culture (by way of the
radical disjunction of the new Utopian high-modernist building from its
surrounding context); while the prophetic elitism and authoritarianism of the
modern movement are remorselessly denounced in the imperious gesture of the
charismatic Master.
Postmodernism in architecture will then logically enough
stage itself as a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Venturi’s
influential manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, suggests. However we may
ultimately wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric, it has at least the merit
of drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms
enumerated above: namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially
high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial
culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms,
categories and contents of that very Culture Industry so passionately denounced
by all the ideologues of the modern, from Leavis and the American New Criticism
all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernisms have in
fact been fascinated precisely by this whole ‘degraded’ landscape of schlock
and kitsch, of tv series and Readers’ Digest culture, of advertising
and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature
with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the
popular biography, the murder mystery and sciencefiction or fantasy novel:
materials they no longer simply ‘quote’, as a Joyce or a Mahler might have
done, but incorporate into their very substance.
Nor should the break in question be thought of as a purely
cultural affair: indeed, theories of the postmodern—whether celebratory or
couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation—bear a strong
family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalizations
which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration
of a whole new type of society, most famously baptized ‘post-industrial
society’ (Daniel Bell), but often also designated consumer society, media
society, information society, electronic society or ‘high tech’, and the like.
Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their
own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws
of classical capitalism, namely the primacy of industrial production and the
omnipresence of class struggle. The Marxist tradition has therefore resisted
them with vehemence, with the signal exception of the economist Ernest Mandel,
whose book Late Capitalism sets out not merely to anatomize the
historic originality of this new society (which he sees as a third stage or
moment in the evolution of capital), but also to demonstrate that it is, if
anything, a purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that
preceded it. I will return to this argument later; suffice it for the moment to
emphasize a point I have defended in greater detail elsewherefootnote, namely
that every position on postmodernism in culture—whether apologia or
stigmatization—is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an
implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational
capitalism today.
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